Master of the long game? Unmatched command of Senate rules, procedure and tradition? Not gonna cut it this time, Mitch

 I sat there and watched it live this evening. My reaction wasn't exactly a drop of the jaw. It was more of a sense of, well, now we know:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday he would support Donald Trump in 2024 if he became the Republican presidential nominee, less than two weeks after condemning the former president for the Capitol insurrection.

“The nominee of the party? Absolutely,” McConnell told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Thursday when asked whether he would back Trump if he got the nomination.

The remark comes amid a dramatic, public row between the former president and McConnell in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — an event for which McConnell blamed Trump in scathing statements on the Senate floor. Trump in turn blasted McConnell last week as an “unsmiling political hack” who is weakening the Republican Party.

During his interview with Baier, McConnell stopped short of offering his immediate support for Trump in what is likely to be a crowded Republican 2024 field. McConnell stressed that numerous other Republicans had also hinted their intentions of a 2024 presidential run.

“There’s a lot to happen between now and ’24,” McConnell said. “I’ve got at least four members that I think are planning on running for president, plus some governors and others. There’s no incumbent. It should be a wide-open race and fun for you all to cover.”

McConnell signaled his desire to move on from the 2020 elections and focus instead on retaking the House and Senate in 2022. When asked about Trump’s role in the Republican losses in the special elections for Georgia’s Senate seats, McConnell flatly said: “I don’t have any further observations to make about that. We’re looking forward.”

McConnell also rebuffed Trump’s attack against him that he was injuring the party’s prospects. McConnell maintained that there was no “civil war” within the party and that it remained competitive with Democrats in razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate.

Notice how he went in for that "move on" crap. And responded to the question about a Republican civil war with the same old citing of electoral victories in the House, Senate, and state governments - as if the censures issued by those state governments were negligible - and exuded nothing but confidence.

You're 79, Senator. Do you really want to go out on such a disgraceful note?

How to disqualify yourself from talking about that which you're correct about

 There's a fair chance you've seen the short video of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene putting a large sign reading "There Are Two Genders: Male And Female. Trust The Science" on the hallway wall right outside her office door. It must have adhesive backing; she smoothes it out and it clings to the wall. She then wipes her hands that's-that style and gives the camera a quick glimpse of a self-satisfied smirk. 

She did this explicitly because Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL) has her office directly across the hall and won't fail to see it whenever she steps into the hallway. Newman has publicly stated her intention to vote for the Equality Act making its way through Congress.

Adam Kinzinger, in his tweet about the matter, provides a bit of backstory concerning that:

Adam Kinzinger

@RepKinzinger

This is sad and I’m sorry this happened.  Rep. Newmans daughter is transgender, and this video and tweet represents the hate and fame driven politics of self-promotion at all evil costs. This garbage must end, in order to #RestoreOurGOP

There's more backstory, though. Newman had raised the transgender flag (whatever that looks like; I wasn't aware transgenderism had a flag) outside her office after House debate on the bill.

Some thoughts:

1.) Marjorie Taylor Greene is a terrible person who is primarily interested in obscene grandstanding such as her Facebook campaign post juxtaposing a photo of herself holding an automatic rifle with a collage of photos of Representatives Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib (each and all of whom - and I'll keep this digression brief - have likewise demonstrated that ideologically charged grandstanding is more important than legislating to them) with the caption "The Squad's Worst Nightmare." She's also the last person who should be proselytizing about any aspect of sexual morality, given her affairs with fitness trainers while her husband stood by eunuch-like.

2.) The sign, taken at face value, is indeed not wrong. There are only two genders, male and female.

3.) As noted above, Newman made the first move by putting up the flag (although that was probably in response to MTG shooting off her mouth with unnecessary invective during the debate). That seems to go beyond any kind of solidarity with her daughter (as an individual) one could infer from the gesture. Nearly everybody loves her or his daughter. It's the most basic and natural of human bonds. To place her daughter in a recently manufactured demographic category ("the transgender community") and add that to reasons for loving her is to gloss over the serious and irreversible implications of the decision the daughter has made to so identify herself.

4.) MTG is a Trumpist, although perhaps it's more accurate to use the term Neo-Trumpist, since the movement has morphed to produce a wave of major figures who will be infecting national affairs whether Donald Trump's influence continues or wanes. It's a force to contend with. Indeed, it seems to have taken over the Republican Party to the point that the likes of Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Ben Sasse et al may have to make the hard decision to join those of us who have given up on the GOP. MTG is yet another example of a mouthpiece through which a basic truth gets uttered who is so (rightly) discredited as to blight the general public's impression of the truth being uttered. 

It seems that every day something occurs that makes the task of an actual conservative more daunting. Combatting the perception on the part of the only-casually-engaged citizen that anyone right of center is a nut, bonehead or bigot is something we will have to become more adept at.

Ron Johnson's unfortunate peddling of delusion at a Senate hearing

 This is a tale of a number of  people and organizations that started out doing important work in this world, only to deteriorate into crackpot espousers of overheated sensationalisms.

It starts with Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson's participation in a Senate hearing yesterday:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read a report blaming “agent provocateurs” and people who “obviously didn’t fit in” for the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 — concluding that they “probably planned this.”

The senator read experts from a report by J Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center of Security Policy, entitled I Saw Provocateurs At The Capitol Riot On Jan. 6 and published by The Federalist. 

“At about 11:30, I walked from near Union Station … and noticed a small number of Capitol Police dressed in full riot gear, with shin guards and shoulder guards,” he read, adding that he then saw a “positive and festive” crowd leaving Trump’s “Save America” to walk down Constitution Avenue.

Johnson went on to read that Waller had noticed four types of people that “stood out” in the MAGA crowd, adding that they “obviously didn’t fit in” with the families in attendance or with those in “pro-police shirts”

“Although the crowd represented a broad cross-section of Americans, mostly working-class by their appearance and manner of speech, some people stood out,” he read. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”

He went on to describe the four groups he noticed stood out: “Plainclothes militants, agents provocateurs, fake Trump protesters, and then disciplined, uniformed column of attackers.”

“I think these are the people that probably planned this,” Johnson said.

Johnson continued to read the report, which noted that D.C. Metropolitan Police seemed to be acting normally on that day, but also claimed there was no law enforcement at the Capitol.

“Several marchers expressed surprise,” Johnson read, adding, “The openness seemed like a courtesy gesture from Congress, which controls security.”

The claim that Antifa or outside provocateurs were responsible for the riot has been repeatedly fact-checked, especially after The Washington Times published a report that falsely claimed a facial recognition firm said Antifa infiltrated and posed as pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol.

Senator Johnson at one time had his head on straight, but that's all over now:

Johnson, who came to the Senate by upsetting the chronically underfunded Russ Feingold in 2010 and then beating him again in a 2016 rematch, used to come across as boring and unoriginal. Not any more, notes veteran Wisconsin journalist Bruce Murphy:

It’s remarkable to see the transformation of Johnson, who ran as a businessman concerned about the federal deficit and was consumed by the issue in his early years. He has gradually transformed into a collector of crackpot theories and conspiracies and one of the strangest senators serving today. 

And The Federalist's descent from a venue solidly in the mainstream of conservatism into a Trumpist organ has been saddening to watch. Even long-timers who once did great work such as Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway have imbibed the Kool-Aid. 

J. Michael Waller, the author of the Federalist piece cited by Johnson, was an invaluable source for the details about the Marxist-Leninist nature of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front and El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front throughout the 1980s, when Central America was the staging ground of one of the last proxy conflicts of the Cold War. 

Looking back on his style of presentation, I can now see that his intended audience was people who were ate up with geo-strategic concerns. I certainly fit that bill at the time. As I've recounted before, an appearance by a guy from the local "peace fellowship" at the Unitarian fellowship I was attending who'd recently returned from a "fact-finding" mission to the region was the catalyst for my conversion experience by which I became a conservative. This peace-fellowship guy was feeding the congregation a lot of hooey about Reagan foreign policy supporting bad guys and I'd been reading some books that set the record straight, starting with New York Times reporter Shirley Christian's Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, and including monographs Waller had written for the Council for Inter-American Security. I was pretty well versed on the players and the roots of the situation, guys like Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge tracts like the 72-Hour Document and Communist front organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. 

But Waller's one of those guys who remained overheated about the world-stage stakes even after the Cold War was over, and had so much invested in his career as a deep diver that he felt compelled to keep at it. 

The Federalist piece, and Johnson's reading from it, are an embarrassment. It's all speculation. People seeming to fall into four categories. The first category being "jovial." Unsubstantiated inference about leftist groups being at the core of the violence. 

The whole thing is a case study in how agendas can cloud people's views of actual reality. There are so many people still striving to fit facts into a Trumpist narrative that they flush their reputations down the toilet.

The most unfortunate thing about that is that each time it happens, it makes it that much more difficult for remaining conservatives to articulate our worldview convincingly. The public's view that anyone right of center is a crank gets reinforced.

Thanks for nothin', Ron.

 

 

Monday roundup

 As you're aware, since the Biden administration has commenced, there is a renewed focus on the global climate. One figure whose pronouncements on the subject are getting a lot of attention is Bill Gates. David Harsanyi at National Review shows that most of what Gates has to say is good old collectivist coercion based on shoddy "scientific" conclusions:

Americans use over 20 million barrels of petroleum products every day — now more abundant and easier to extract than ever before — so, unless some completely new technology emerges, it will take a fascistic technocracy to win this conflict. Now, I don’t use “fascistic” lightly here. Nor am I suggesting that Gates envisions goose-stepping Gestapo agents banging on your door every time you set the air conditioner below 75 degrees. And, anyway, what kind of monster would own an air conditioner with an extinction-level threat hanging over humanity? He does, however, envision the state dictating virtually every decision made by industry that relates to carbon emissions — which is to say the entire economy. If there is a more precise phrase that describes a state-controlled economy that directs both private and public ownership over the means of production during wartime, I will be happy to use it.

One for the you-will-get-your-mind-right file. Coca Cola has instituted a confronting-racism "training program" that shows you how to be less oppressive, arrogant, certain, defensive and ignorant. One screen from the presentation says that "one-time workshops on racism are not enough." The company needs to "establish a set of organizational practices such as monthly affinity groups, cross-racial discussions, ongoing professional development, [and] revamped interview questions that address racial issues."

Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility fame is involved in the program's development.

I do believe I've had my last swig of Dr. Pemberton's iconic American elixir. 

Another one for the you-will-get-your-mind-right file: Bari Weiss, writing at her Substack page, recounts the experience of Smith College's Student Support Coordinator Jodi Shaw, who resigned her position rather than submit to identity-politics militancy:

Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school. 

She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.

In October 2020, after Shaw felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial discrimination at the school. 

“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,” she said. “Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”

From Shaw's letter to Smith's president:

in August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and “because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as “cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color.

I was up for a full-time position in the library at that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to which I had devoted months of time. 

Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current, lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life. 

As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race. 

Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.

Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.

I filed an internal complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without explanation. 

Per Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, more campus identity-politics jackboot-ism, leveled at an economics professor who had the temerity to speak common sense about poverty:

Professor Frank Gunter has learned that, the next time Lehigh University asks him to talk about poverty, he should keep his mouth shut. Earlier this year, Lehigh asked its business school faculty to offer counsel to the Biden administration in a series of short “kitchen table talk” videos.  

Gunter, a professor of economics, did as he was asked. In late January, Lehigh posted his video on “Three Myths Concerning Poverty.” Sounding a lot like AEI’s own Ian Rowe, Gunter argued that poverty is not “mostly a matter of race,” that it’s not a “generational curse,” and that individuals have great agency when it comes to determining their own economic fate.

Gunter observed that most black Americans are not in poverty and that three-quarters of poor Americans aren’t black, while pointing to data on economic mobility to rebut those who suggest that poverty is an inherited condition. He proceeded to note that evidence on the “success sequence” suggests that a series of straightforward actions (finish high school, get a job, get married before having kids) will keep most Americans out of poverty. 

For doing what Lehigh had asked, Gunter was soon attacked by students and faculty for his choice of topics, evidence, data presentation, verbiage, and context. Students for Black Lives Matter thundered, “The points brought up by Professor Gunter were not points of opinion, but incorrect and damaging statistics meant to put blame on impoverished people.” Of course, what Gunter said is more accurately characterized as a series of “accurate data points” than as “points of opinion.”

In any event, Students for Black Lives Matter labeled Gunter’s little video “racist and ignorant” and then gave the game away, declaring, “We don’t need a debate, we need action.” In short order, the university complied. It took down the video. The College of Business then explained that, to correct for Gunter’s wrongthink, it would “post more videos with diverse perspectives on this topic.” Lehigh then reposted Gunter’s informal little video chat alongside a critique created by its departments of sociology and anthropology, without informing Gunter of what it was doing or giving him a chance to respond in turn.

Even the teaching of mathematics is not untouched by this kind of poison.  

Look, I'm no fan of Ted Cruz or Kayleigh McEnanay, and not much of one of Dan Crenshaw, but this campaign afoot on the Harvard campus to revoke their degrees from that institution is chilling.

Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition on what you need to know about the Equality Act that the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on. The essence of why it's disturbing:

As Andrew T. Walker wrote in an article for TGC, “The bill represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America. Given that it touches areas of education, public accommodation, employment, and federal funding, were it to pass, its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling.”

“Virtually no area of American life would emerge unscathed from the Equality Act’s reach,” Walker added. “No less significant would be the long-term effects of how the law would shape the moral imagination of future generations.”

Twenty-four states have similar laws, and the consequences for residents of those states have been disastrous, says Monica Burke, research assistant in the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. “These policies are not being used to promote equality,” Burke says. “Instead, they are being used as a blunt-force weapon to ban disagreement on marriage and sexuality by punishing dissenters.”

Arkansas state senator Jim Hendren's powerful statement on why he's leaving the Republican Party. 

The valid argument that the Very Stable Genius's most positive legacy is his judicial appointments is rich with irony. Today's example is the Supreme Court ruling that a New York grand jury can obtain the VSG's tax returns.  Hee hee. 

 

 

 

Unforced errors and political implosions

 The fact of the matter is that post-America's current state of polarization is not just a tug of war between left and right, or even a three-way struggle, behind left, right and Trumpism. The more basic plight of human beings generally - the inability to get out of their own way - is an element that's had a lot of influence on events lately.

The currently popular way of framing the Republican party's role in this scenario is that it is weakened in such a tug of war by the fact that, while Trumpism is decidedly ascendant within the GOP, an opposition, represented by the likes of Ben Sasse, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer, Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan, refuses to concede any kind of finality regarding the outcome of the standoff. It's a largely accurate depiction, but one more factor has to be considered: jaw-droppingly stupid decisions by various Trumpists that are immediately recognized as horrible optics by the general public. The antics of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene certainly qualify, but this week Senator Ted Cruz of Texas blew their doors off.

His Cancun fiasco was such an egregious unforced error as to be surreal. The Texas Senator is not a stupid man. He was recognized by faculty and fellow students alike at Harvard Law School as a formidable intellect. His command of the Constitution is widely recognized. While his attempts eight or nine years ago to overturn the Affordable Care Act were arguably quixotic to the point of being ill-advised, they were based on the principle that the free market and not government should address glitches in the production and consumption of health care. The list he put forth when running for president in 2016 of departments and agencies he'd target for dismantling was likewise bold to the point of improbability, but it was born of principle. 

Like many a Republican politician, he's displayed a character-level deterioration during the Trump years. Still, nothing could have prepared anyone for the stunning lapse of basic judgement he exhibited this week. Every aspect of it - not sticking around his home state to coordinate relief efforts and engage in other concrete manifestations of compassion, leaving the country during a pandemic, blaming his daughters for the decision to take off for Cancun, the fancy resort that was his destination, and leaving his pet poodle alone in a freezing house - was a public-relations nightmare. 

It mystifies. 

Then again, so does the entire cooking-the-nursing-home-numbers scandal in which New York governor Andrew Cuomo is embroiled. It has opened a floodgate of revelations about his personal conduct while in office that will be daunting, to say the least, to recover from. It brings out into the harsh light of day the mutual animosity between him and New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio:

Threatening Queens Assemblymember Ron Kim (D) sounds like something New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) would do, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D).

The New York mayor spoke to MSNBC's Morning Joe on Thursday after Kim alleged that Cuomo called him to "threaten my career" amid a growing scandal involving the state's handling of information on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. De Blasio, who has often clashed with Cuomo, expressed support for Kim on MSNBC.

"That's classic Andrew Cuomo," de Blasio said. "A lot of people in New York State have received those phone calls. The bullying is nothing new."

And it's a long-standing modus operandi:

Such is life on the wrong side of Cuomo, whose credo for those who stand in his path was coined early in his first term by one of their own: “We operate on two speeds here: Get along, and kill," Steve Cohen, then Cuomo’s top aide, said in an exchange first reported by the Connecticut Post in 2011.

The characterization, which came during a contentious discussion with former Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy’s team, has come to define the Queens native’s modus operandi to the point of becoming a cliché in New York political circles. (POLITICO on Thursday confirmed the 2011 exchange with multiple people around Malloy at the time.)

The proverb has even become something akin to a badge of honor for some Cuomo staffers in the years since, cocksure in their belief of their boss' singular ability to bend the state government apparatus to fulfill his vision of Democratic politics.

 On the other side of the continent, California governor Gavin Newsom has done his best to contend for the prize of Most Astoundingly Foolish Move By A Democrat With A Formerly Promising Future, with last November's maskless lunch at The French Laundry, a Napa Valley restaurant that is as upscale as it gets. It has resulted in a recall effort that has a real chance of succeeding.

It's probably best advised not to be too hasty about using commonalities among these situations to draw conclusions, but it does seem that ambition is clearly at play in all of them. The brass ring in politics must have the power to skew one's judgement in a particularly powerful way. 

How the moves on the part of all these figures could have been avoided will haunt them and their supporters in that distinctive way that anyone living with deep regret knows all about. One more five-minute pause before acting, one more conversation with a trusted confidant who is permitted to offer an opposing viewpoint, could well have changed the trajectory of personal fate and, indeed, history. 

We see, once again, that fallibility is baked into who we are as human creatures. Resisting its predominance in our psyches is no easy task, and probably cannot be done without reliance on a presence wholly other than ourselves, or any person around us. 

These people probably know that in the core of their beings and would give anything to turn back the clock and give that quiet presence its proper heed. 

 

Nikki Haley finds out that even the slightest deviation from slavish devotion gets you cut loose by the VSG

 This is rich.

Nikki Haley has been the poster girl for have-it-both-ways-ism since the Very Stable Genius lost the November election. 

In mid-December, the was playing the we-must-humor-him-in-his-delusion card:

Channeling George Costanza in mid-December, Haley refused to confront Trump over his election lies because he believed they were true. “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told Alberta. “This is not him making it up.”

Then came the interview with Tim Alberta of Politico in which she went for the he's-done-as-a-force-in-our-party angle:

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” Haley, who served in her ambassador role under Trump, said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Haley’s remarks are her strongest yet against the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and come as Trump's legal team is set to present its defense of Trump on Friday in his second Senate impeachment trial.

She was mighty ticked off, doncha know:

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley said. “I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”

Then, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she went for the oh-come-on-let's-be-grown-ups-capable-of-embracing-complexity-here-and-eschew-polarization angle:

. . . the liberal media . . . wants to stoke a nonstop Republican civil war. The media playbook starts with the demand that everyone pick sides about Donald Trump—either love or hate everything about him. The moment anyone on the right offers the slightest criticism of the 45th president, the media goes berserk: Republicans are trying to have it both ways! It’s a calculated strategy to pit conservatives against one another. It’s also a ridiculous false choice. Real life is never that simple. Someone can do both good and bad things. 

People feel strongly about Mr. Trump, but we can acknowledge reality. People on the left, if they’re honest, can find Trump accomplishments they like—a coronavirus vaccine in record time, Middle East peace, more accountability from China. People on the right can find fault with Trump actions, including on Jan. 6. Right or left, when people make these distinctions, they’re not trying to have it both ways. They’re using their brains.

Just as important, they’re proving people are more than their party affiliations. If we can’t make judgments beyond whether someone is Republican or Democrat, then America can’t face its biggest challenges. We separate into two camps that always hate each other. We become estranged from family and friends over politics.

And now comes the hardee-har-har moment. 

She wanted to make the pilgrimage, a la Kevin McCarthy, to Mar-a-Lago, but the VSG has said, "Nothing doing."

She's certainly mastered the art of 2021 Republican self-abasement, although, to be fair, it seems she's been outdone, at least for the time being, by Ted Cruz. How were the margaritas at that Cancun resort, Ted?

 

 

Rush Limbaugh, R.I.P.

 He finally succumbed to the lung cancer that had menaced him for some tine but did not deter him from his life's calling, right up to the very end.

The son and grandson of lawyers in the small river city of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he dismayed his family by dropping out of college after a year to plunge without looking back into a radio career, first as a spinner of platters in Pittsburgh and elsewhere under the name Jeff Christy. Career advancement was eluding him, though, so he took a hiatus and went to work in a marketing position for the Kansas City Chiefs. Then he got an opportunity at a Sacramento station, where management gave him the one-sentence guideline that catapulted him to legend status: Be yourself.

He combined the elements of schtick he'd developed earlier with utter conviction about the core principles of conservatism. His regular features such as the Environmental Update, the Feminist Update, the Homeless Update and the Peace Update shone the unsparing light of common sense on various leftist presumptions, creating space for an alternative viewpoint even as those presumptions, which, in sum, came to be known as political correctness, ever-increasingly permeated our culture. 

Millions of regular Americans who had a vague sense that their outlooks were informed by this worldview called conservatism were thrilled to hear him articulate their principles daily, forthrightly and entertainingly. Suddenly one could come right out and say these things!

He was also a man of great generosity, giving his time and money to a number of charitable causes. 

There was something kind of lonely about him, though, and part of that was his own doing. The combination of self-isolation and huge ego manifested itself in such ways as decking out his home and means of transportation so that he could enjoy mundane activities as going to the movies or watching sporting events in person in a way that kept his personal contact with the general public to a bare minimum. He took care to brand himself as being in a sphere separate from other practitioners of the talk-radio genre. It took him the fourth of his marriages to make a successful go of that institution.  

Ultimately, part of being a talk-radio pioneer meant that he made manifest the genre's limitations. Bombast was central to his persona, and in his wake came a number of imitators who could not pull that off with anything like his palpable humanity. 

And I daresay that that is how he succumbed to the Trumpist fever. He could identify with the Very Stable Genius's bombast, and it caused Rush to lose sight of the self-deprecation ("I'm just a harmless little fuzzball.") and commitment to consistency of principle that had made him the Big Voice On The Right. He'd been feted by big-shot celebrities in just about every field since he went national, and was impressed by how Trump had done likewise.

For that reason, I quit listening to him years ago, but I've never lost sight of the essence of the contribution he made to American life. 

He said it was okay to point out that some things are right, some things are wrong, some things make sense and some things are utter hooey. In the years when he was on top of his game, he did it with utter hilarity, self-confidence and an ease of comportment that created a space on our society's ideological spectrum that conservatism had never enjoyed before.

A true American original.

It doesn't appear there's going to be any moving on from Trump or Trumpism for the GOP

 The Very Stable Genius is ensconced at Mar-a-Lago, with considerably fewer means of communication at his disposal than he had a few weeks ago, but he can still issue statements on a letterhead that looks strikingly similar to the official seal of a current US president. 

On such a sheet of paper, he let loose with a blast of vitriol against Mitch McConnell that also included, for good measure, yet another round of don't-forget-how-many-votes-I-got-and-what-good-shape-the-economy-was-in-before-the-pandemic braggadocio:

Former President Donald Trump fired back at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday, releasing a scathing statement after McConnell published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal blaming him for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Trump said in a written statement. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse.”

He wasn't done grinding Mitch into the dust:

“The Democrats and Chuck Schumer play McConnell like a fiddle — they’ve never had it so good — and they want to keep it that way! We know our America First agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last,” Trump said in his statement, adding, “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again. He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country.”

And then comes this low blow:

Trump also went after McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, his own former secretary of transportation, insinuating that her family’s business presented a conflict of interest.

“Likewise, McConnell has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings. He does nothing on this tremendous economic and military threat,” Trump said in the statement without clarifying why, given those circumstances, he had appointed her to his Cabinet in the first place.

Chao resigned her position two days after the Capitol riot, which she called “entirely avoidable.” 

Granted, McConnell hasn't exactly delivered a consistent message that would bolster a bold-leader image, what with his rhetoric - before the convict/acquit vote, immediately afterward, and in the WSJ op-ed - being glaringly at odds with his actual vote:

As Yogi Berra might say, when McConnell came to a fork in the road, he took it.

McConnell’s theory is that he can have it both ways: Simultaneously denounce Trump and provide him cover in the hope of reconciling the divisions in the party that cannot be reconciled. McConnell, though as shrewd as they come, will fail to satisfy both Republican and independent voters — and donors — horrified by Trump and the movement of those who want Trumpist populism to define the party.

McConnell’s choice is emblematic of the GOP’s rot. Republicans claim to fight for fidelity to the Constitution, traditional morality, law and order, economic liberty, fiscal responsibility, etc. As a conservative, I believe these are things worth fighting for. But most Republicans today don’t see these as principles to stand for, they see them as slogans to campaign on.

I recently wrote a post about the censure-mania that has broken out among state-level Republican parties. Since then, I've come across this pronouncement from a Pennsylvania GOP leader, regarding Pat Toomey's vote, that expresses the majority sentiment in the party when it comes to fealty to Trump versus any other consideration:

A Pennsylvania GOP official became the subject of online mockery Tuesday after bashing Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) for voting to convict former President Donald Trump during the impeachment trial last week.

Washington County GOP chair Dave Ball, during an interview with local CBS affiliate KDKA, said Pennsylvania voters didn’t send Toomey to Washington to “vote his conscience” and should have stood by Trump.

Lindsey Graham is an example of a different type of Trump-era Republican. He's never expected anybody to give more than surface-deep heed to his so-called positions. In 2016, he called the Very Stable Genius a xenophobe and bigot whose nomination would destroy the party. He's now got a diametrically opposed message:

Instead of defending Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from Donald Trump’s scathing rebuke on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) went on Hannity to tell the Senate Minority Leader that he should just accept Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party. 

“I know Trump can be a handful,” Graham told the Fox News host, “but he is the most dominant figure in the Republican Party. We don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking back the majority without Donald Trump.”

Calling Trump a “hell of a president on all of the things that conservatives really believe in,” he added, “I’m sorry what happened on January 6th. He’ll get his fair share of blame, but to my Republican colleagues in the Senate, let’s try to work together and realize that without President Trump, we’re never going to get back in the majority.”

I'm still unwilling to put myself on record here or at Precipice as writing off a future for the Republican Party with finality. I'm well aware of the resources - donor money, on-the-ground volunteers, precinct committees and county parties, enlistment of viable candidates for offices at all levels - needed to build a party that cn truly contend on the national level.

But I'm nearly there. I honestly don't see how a party this poisoned by a cult of personality can build the "big tent" of which it speaks, especially considering that the Trumpists have no use for actual conservatives.

If the GOP must be abandoned to the slavish devotees of Donald Trump, let the break be clean. And let us articulate why it happened in a way that any even minimally engaged citizen can understand.

 

 

State-level Republican parties are soaked in Kool-AId

 I just don't think the advice that one should put one's political focus on realms of political activity closer to home, because that's where one can have more of an impact, is worth a whole lot these days.

Censure mania has broken out at the state level against those Republican Senators who understood that Donald Trump whipped his cult following into a frenzy for two months based on lies, that he sat on his hands when those inside the Capitol on January 6 implored him to call out the National Guard, and that he proved once and for all that he didn't give a flying you-know-what about his lapdog Vice President, tweeting about said lapdog's "lack of courage" while said lapdog's life was in mortal danger.

Bill Cassidy has come in for it in Louisiana:

The Louisiana Republican Party on Saturday censured Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for voting to convict former President Donald Trump of incitement during the close of Trump’s second impeachment trial earlier in the day.

The state party’s executive committee voted unanimously to censure Cassidy, who won reelection in November, hours after the Senate voted to acquit Trump. Though a majority of senators (57) voted to convict the former president, conviction required a two-thirds majority.

“We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump,” the Louisiana GOP said in a statement on Facebook. “Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him.”

 Richard Burr in North Carolina looks set to get the same treatment this evening:

According to party spokesman Tim Wigginton, it’s likely that the vote will pass amid the anger brewing within the GOP over the senator’s vote to convict. State party chairman Michael Whatley called Burr’s decision “shocking and disappointing.”

Kyshia Lineberger, the RNC committeewoman from North Carolina, is also among Burr’s critics.

The petition in Utah to censure Mitt Romney includes a phrase so central in Trumpist rhetoric but so hackneyed as to elicit eye rolls among anyone not hopelessly ate up. I have put it in boldface:

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that within 24 hours of the latest vote, a petition to censure Romney started making the rounds in some Utah Republican social media circles.

"A tipster sent along a link to the proposed censure of Romney", it adds.

The action claims he "misrepresented himself as a Republican".

The politician is also accused of "prioritizing his personal and political vendetta against President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Constitution of the United States... and the advancement of the Republican Platform."

The censure slams Romney for "embarrassing the state of Utah" by being the sole Republican to vote to convict Trump during his first impeachment trial.

"Senator Williard Mitt Romney appears to be an agent for the Establishment Deep State", the censure adds.

Here in Indiana, no censures are forthcoming since both Senators voted to acquit. But be assured that the state-level party here is saturated in Kool-Aid as well. Here's a tweeted image from our secretary of state Todd Rokita:

I cannot articulate the significance of these moves any better than Washington Examiner contributor Quin Hilyer has: 

Quin Hillyer

@QuinHillyer

This must be said: ANY state party organization that "censures" any member of Congress for a vote of conscience to impeach/convict a president who maliciously and recklessly put his own Veep's life in danger... is a state party full of moral rot and a totalitarianism of thought.

Taking that final step and saying the GOP is so hopelessly infected that conservatives must abandon it and do their work outside its structure is something I'm not ready to do yet. Maybe in a couple of minutes. 

The indispensable Adam Kinzinger's PAC is predicated on working to see that conservatism prevails over Trumpism within the party. 

Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute, generally regarded as one of the true sages of political analysis thinks it will continue to be the only viable repository of right-of-center activity in the country. So does National Review editor Rich Lowry. These people don't commit their bylines to assessments they have not thought out with great care.

But Quin is likewise a responsible pundit, and I think he has the more compelling case. The infection is so pervasive it seems best to let the patient die.

 

 

In a fallen world, disappointment is inevitable

 

Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help.

- Psalm 146:3

Left or right, if you invest too much in making your objects of admiration into heroes, you run an excellent chance of being let down.

Current examples abound. 

Early on in the pandemic's rampage, New York governor Andrew Cuomo had a considerable number of people in his corner, due in large part to those who took his side when the Trump administration cast aspersions on the way the Cuomo administration handled things in that state. 

The number of supporters had been dwindling, and I would imagine will be dwindling further after this revelation:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.

The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”

In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”

“And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call.

Granted, the Very Stable Genius never made it easy for anybody to proceed forthrightly with anything, but we''re talking about human beings with loved ones who became pawns in a numbers game. 

The high-stakes Senate runoff races in Georgia went in favor of the Democrats, and, in spite of Raphael Warnock's track record of support for Palestinian radicalism vis-a-vis Israel, the nation generally made its peace with the results and he was sworn in. Now, it appears that he's in some hot water over possible funny business: 

The Georgia State Election Board voted unanimously Wednesday to move forward with an investigation of U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) for his role serving as board chairman of a voter registration organization founded by Stacey Abrams that election officials say failed to follow deadlines, in what appears to be the latest legal step in the ongoing feud between the progressive Abrams and the state’s Republican election officials.

Before I yield to any temptation to be smug about the above developments, let us note that my bunch - that is to say, anti-Trump conservatives - is witnessing one of the major institutional players in disseminating the message of the Very Stable Genius's unfitness implode in real time. A lot of us had, early on, noticed an odor of unseemliness emanating from the Lincoln Project, and stayed away. Now it seems that what we were intuiting has been borne out:

Jennifer Horn, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, blasted her colleagues at the anti-Donald Trump Republican group in a blistering Thursday statement.

Horn, who resigned from the organization last week, suggested some people in the group had known about the sexual harassment allegations against co-founder John Weaver long before they were made public by The New York Times in a Jan. 31 exposé. 

Horn, the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, also accused her colleagues of refusing to “properly address” the allegations against Weaver after the Times published its article — and said she was “demeaned and lied to” when she challenged the group on its response to the claims.

Ted Cruz, in whom I'd once placed my hopes for a nice, clean conservative renaissance, has, over the course of the last five years, made a steady descent into sycophancy and self-humiliation. Now, as a member of the jury in a very momentous trial, he's openly meeting (along with Mike Lee, whom I'd once greatly admired, and Lindsey Graham, whom I've never admired) with the defendant's legal team:

 

As House Democrats concluded their case Thursday against former president Donald Trump, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz met privately with Trump’s defense team to discuss the status of the former president’s case.

Ted gave them a little strategy coaching:

Senator Cruz later said that he was the one who suggested the meeting, which lasted about an hour. “I just wanted to sit down and say, OK, what are you looking to put forward and to share our thoughts in terms of where things are,” Cruz told Fox NewsThursday night. He said he urged the defense team to focus on “legal standard.” While Democrats made their most graphic case to the American public, Trump’s lawyers and Republicans are focusing on legal rather than emotional or historic questions.

Nikki Haley was a pretty good South Carolina governor - no major missteps, anyway - and was absolutely thrilling to watch in action as US ambassador to the UN. I felt we had another Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick or John Bolton up there on the East River. But then came the suck-up years, in which she spoke glowingly about the Very Stable Genius, apparently hoping for his imprimatur when she made future political moves. 

Now she's trying to walk that back, couching her effort in some kind of pretty lame he's-a-different-man-since-the-election expression of disillusionment. I mean, in the Politico article, she does forthrightly address Trump's disgraceful treatment of Pence, and I suppose a case can be made for letting her have the space she needs to make her public readjustment in perspective, but an equally compelling case can be made, it seems to me that it's a little late in the game for this:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley issued stunning remarks breaking with former President Trump, telling Politico in an interview published Friday that she believes he “let us down.” 

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” Haley, who served in her ambassador role under Trump, said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Haley’s remarks are her strongest yet against the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and come as Trump's legal team is set to present its defense of Trump on Friday in his second Senate impeachment trial.

The House impeached the former president for a second time shortly after the insurrection, saying his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud following his election loss to President Biden and his comments earlier that day incited the mob that stormed the Capitol.

The former South Carolina governor told Politico that she has not spoken with Trump since the mob attack, further expressing her disappointment with remarks he gave at a rally ahead of the assault condemning his own vice president, Mike Pence.

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley said. “I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”

Haley said that the president "believes he is following" his oath of office by challenging the election results, adding, "There’s nothing that you’re ever going to do that’s going to make him feel like he legitimately lost the election." 

I guess we'll take it, but the pronouncements of those who have publicly called out Trump for who he is for much longer have far more weight in my book.

Then there's this new revelation about an aspect of Marjorie Taylor Greene's lifestyle.  I don't know that I find it surprising, exactly, but she's the kind of Trumpist whose constituents tend to be God-country-and-family types, at least in their own estimation (although the also dig the Very Stable Genius, and, as we know, he comes up woefully short in at least two of the three):

Controversial conspiracy congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene cheated on her husband with a polyamorous tantric sex guru, DailyMail.com has learned.

Then after ending her affair with him, the mom-of-three moved on to a gym manager behind her husband's back.

But despite the tawdry flings, Taylor Greene stuck with her husband Perry as she made her unlikely rise that has turned her into the most talked-about Republican in Washington, D.C.

Neither man denied the affairs when approached by DailyMail.com. 

Craig Ivey, the tantric sex practitioner, said: 'I will not respond to anything about this,' while the other man, Justin Tway, said: 'I have no interest in talking about anything to do with that woman. Everything with her comes to no good.'

But others say the new representative from Georgia's 14th Congressional District was brazen about her affairs which she carried on a decade ago while working in gyms in Alpharetta, Georgia, some 35 miles north of Atlanta.

This next example of a disgraced object of admiration has deadly serious implications. Over the years, thousands of people had relied on him for encouragement in their quests to find spiritual grounding. He'd been entrusted with bringing the powerful message of the Gospel to those in deep existential need, and he betrayed them. I suppose prayer for him as well as his victims is the correct way to view this horrifying situation - he had obviously been losing the spiritual-warfare battle going on in his inner being for some time - but that does not diminish the necessity of exposing just what he did:

 Afour-month investigation found the late Ravi Zacharias leveraged his reputation as a world-famous Christian apologist to abuse massage therapists in the United States and abroad over more than a decade while the ministry led by his family members and loyal allies failed to hold him accountable.

He used his need for massage and frequent overseas travel to hide his abusive behavior, luring victims by building trust through spiritual conversations and offering funds straight from his ministry.

A 12-page report released Thursday by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) confirms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncovers five additional victims in the US, as well as evidence of sexual abuse in Thailand, India, and Malaysia.

Even a limited review of Zacharias’s old devices revealed contacts for more than 200 massage therapists in the US and Asia and hundreds of images of young women, including some that showed the women naked. Zacharias solicited and received photos until a few months before his death in May 2020 at age 74.

Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators.

One woman told the investigators that “after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.” She called it rape.

She said Zacharias “made her pray with him to thank God for the ‘opportunity’ they both received” and, as with other victims, “called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God,” the report says. Zacharias warned the woman—a fellow believer—if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.

The findings, alongside details revealed over months of internal reckoning at RZIM, challenge the picture many have had of Zacharias.

When he died in May, he was praised for his faithful witness, his commitment to the truth, and his personal integrity. Now it is clear that, offstage, the man so long admired by Christians around the world abused numerous women and manipulated those around him to turn a blind eye.

The common thread among all these tales of various kinds of weakness is quite simply that the subjects of each were human beings. Human beings, even the ones we love and trust and call family and friends, are fallible. It's only by hanging on to God's grace that any of us can rise above our innate depravity.

The lesson is that it behooves us all to focus on principles and values, discuss principles and values among ourselves and pass them on to our children. Principles and values are immutable. They are not subject to change due to technological advancement or sociocultural trends. 

We can spare ourselves a lot of disillusionment and bitterness if we make the message, not the messenger, the significant aspect of our engagement with the truth. 

Best to save our worship for the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 

The hard truth is that any of the Father's children may break your heart. 

Grace be upon us all.